Coffee with CorpComms

When I met up with Dave King, chief executive of Digitalis
Reputation, to discuss his research into how extremists are exploiting the
Internet, I could not have imagined that just two days later three terrorists
would launch an attack on London Bridge.

While prime minister Theresa May talked about tackling ‘safe
spaces online’, King has identified another major issue: put simply, ISIS is a ‘great’
content marketer. (Hold on! Don’t splutter out your coffee in horror: I used
inverted commas.) But his exhaustive research
does reveal that the terrorist group uses SEO techniques, like any major brand,
to ensure that its messages rise to the top of the search engine rankings for
those who might tentatively seek some answers about its cause.

It is not building Facebook groups and Twitter accounts in
the hope that potential followers might seek them out, but is instead
aggressively pushing its messages to the top when its algorithm finds a web
user showing an interest.

The report A War of Keywords, which was commissioned by the
Centre on Religion and Geopolitics, an international think tank that analyses
the interaction of religion, conflict and geopolitics, draws on Digitalis
Reputation’s expertise – its technology is able to displace legacy issues for
businesses from search engine listings. In short, it knows how the game is
played.

As King explains: ‘The Centre explained to us the
stereotypical journey of a teenage boy or girl in the west, who is not in any
way radicalised but who is possibly infuriated by society and highly
vulnerable, who goes online looking for information around themes that have
interested them in the media, like caliphate.

‘And the fascinating hypothesis, which triggered the
research, about the recruitment of interested moderates was that they weren’t suddenly
following a radical preacher on social media, as governments might assume, they
were Googling the phrases, like caliphate. And the big questions we then asked were,
are ISIS and other terrorist groups researching their markets, are they
engaging in SEO to promote their assets and are they becoming increasingly
sophisticated in this area?’

Using SEO to find potential recruits

Indeed, Digitalis’ initial research identified half a
million monthly searches on Google in the UK around phrases of interest. ‘ISIS know that the start of the journey of a vulnerable interested
moderate is a search on a search engine for an innocent phrase. These aren’t people
looking for beheadings,’ says King. ‘Much like anyone in marketing or
recruitment is increasingly trying to promote their site to rank highly, in the
very same way ISIS and other groups are absolutely promoting their websites to
rank at the top of the Google searches.’

As King says, this means that the innocent teenager looking
for information will instead find violent content on
websites linked to terror groups. The counter narrative, which is produced by
dozens of respectful Muslim groups, just does not rank. ‘The level of sophistication
being applied to this grooming and recruitment is high. Often what is presented
on page one of Google is not seriously radical, but it gets users onto these
sites which are controlled by terror groups, and then there is almost a filtering
process where they will gradually be exposed to more and more radical content.
And some will drop away,’ says King.

‘I’d say it is as sophisticated as some of the very best marketing
online, where brands look for particular types of users, and will only pay to
reach them. And then the brand will filter that group down to reach the very best
customers.’

The terror groups have also learned how to exploit Google’s
ranking algorithm, which reportedly takes account of 200 different factors, but
is particularly favourable towards link-building. If more people link to or
reference an article on social media, it must be more interesting than an
article without any. Thus, an online library, which contains literature and
sermons from prominent jihadists, has almost 380,000 links into it from other
sites. Other sites had ‘millions of links, likes and tweets into a particular
page’, says King. Some were ‘natural’ links while others were specifically
created to boost SEO. ‘There is absolute deliberate promotion being invested
in, either through money or man hours.’

He admits to having been ‘shocked’ at the findings. ‘It is
not just that extreme content is present when you search for these innocent
phrases, but the fact that it is often dominant on page one of a Google search.’

Tackling the radical content

So where is the balanced content, that offers a counter narrative
to that posited by the terror groups? It is there but it is just not visible.
In only 11 per cent of searches conducted by Digitalis did counter-narrative
content outperform that generated by terror groups. It is not because counter-narrative
does not exist, nor that Muslim groups, NGOs and governments are not investing
heavily in its creation. (The research found that 91 per cent of
counter-narratives were Muslim-led efforts, indicating their online fight
against this extremist ideology.) It is simply not working. The counter-narrative
is displayed on websites that simply do not rank highly. ‘When we searched for
counter-narrative we found lots,’ says King. ‘When we searched for
counter-narrative around innocent phrases, we found none.’

In part, this is due to the fragmented nature of the approach.
Each group, and factions within those groups, produce their own content. There
is no attempt to work together to create a powerful response. ‘This counter-narrative
needs help to get it ranking where it should be,’ says King. ‘We don’t see any investment
in SEO on that side. Terrorist content is dominant today but in two years’ time
it will be totally dominant. We’re behind. We can catch up but it requires
significant investment.’

The findings are at odds with the Government’s focus of its
counter-terrorist recruitment initiatives on social media. Does this mean they
are looking in the wrong place, I ask. ‘For some reason, this is a whole area
that is being ignored, partly because of a justifiable focus on social media.
But we are missing the seed of the journey of the grooming and recruitment of
our youth. Where does radicalisation start? It starts online with a search
engine, like so many research journeys do, and that’s the bit that has seen no
focus today.’

But King is not blaming search engine providers. ‘I have an
immense amount of sympathy for Google and others,’ he says. ‘The Government and
media are quick to bash them and say ‘Why didn’t they spot this content?’ The
reality is that Google is trying to index an enormous amount of information,
and whilst it will consider the semantic and contextual relevance of one page
versus another, it is not really built to monitor and understand the nuances of
certain types of content. Whilst they have made great strides to combat child
pornography and abuse and whilst there are great technologies around to
identify images that contain a lot of nudity, say, it is very difficult to
create automated, or even human, systems that can differentiate the huge grey
area between outrageous extreme and moderate.

‘I have sympathy with Google not wanting to be the arbiter
in that area, and nor do I think we want a commercial operation to be so. There
are a lot of nuance and grey areas.’ King points to the criticism that Facebook
came under after it emerged that one of Fusilier Lee Rigby’s murderers had
posted two years previously that he was going to kill someone. Why hadn’t the
platform flagged that, people asked. Yet Facebook has more than 5.5 billion
users who create five billion Likes per day. Its ability to distinguish a
single credible ‘kill’ threat is minimal, to say the least.

‘I have to sit back pragmatically and ask how many people say
they are going to kill someone in jest?’ says King. ‘These are brilliant organisations
built for a specific purpose. We shouldn’t assume they are able to work
miracles.’

The solution to overwhelm the terrorists’ content is, quite
simply says King, to beat them at their own game. This would require the
private sector, religious groups, NGOs and governments to work together. ‘It
does require investment and it probably requires cross-party collaboration,’ he
says. ‘It doesn’t take a tremendous
amount of sophistication on the part of terrorists to ‘win’ the [online] battle,
if nobody else is taking part.’

King concludes: ‘If we want to cut this [terrorism] off at
its roots, we need to go back to the start of the search journey.’